A Creative Writing Assignment for World Malaria Day 2013

This Thursday, April 25 is World Malaria Day and in recognition of this, we’re serving up a creative writing assignment.

Half of the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, is at risk of malaria. And this misnamed “bad air,” mal’ aria in Italian, kills approximately 655,000 children per year; many of who are under the age of 5 and most of who live in sub-Saharan Africa.

And it’s all because of mosquitoes.

So our creative writing assignment is for you to write a World Malaria Day blog post from the perspective of a mosquito, then share what you wrote via the link up below.

To help you get started we’ve written three different paragraphs for you to build upon. You can choose to finish one of them or write something completely from scratch. Either way, be sure to:

Link to our Malaria Intervention Initiative page.

Write something. Anything.

WRITING PROMPTS

Prompt 1:

Poverty is hopeless and depressing. And I’m an agent of poverty—in the preventable disease division. I’m effective too.

Every 30 seconds a child dies from malaria, and I get the assist. It’s enough to make a caring, God-fearing soul see red.

But who cares? Red is just a color, like the color of a blood cocktail with 50 thousand plasmodia swimming in a drop the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

Fifty thousand is overkill when it only takes one determined to do what needs to be done.

Prompt 2:

Buon giorno! (That’s hello in Italian.) My name is Massimo the Mosquito and yes, I am a member of the much-feared Malaria Mafia. I am sure you have heard of us.

Just a few years ago the World Health Organization said we were responsible for the deaths of 655,000 people. Although I cannot confirm or deny that, I do have a confession to make.

Lean closer. I don’t want the other mosquitoes to hear this…

Prompt 3:

Three years sober and going strong. I’ve been on the patch, that is, the flower patch.

It was lonely in those fields and don’t think I didn’t have my run-ins with the queen bee.

But others are joining me thanks to a movie named Twilight and a toothy vampire who fell in love with a human. Blood sucking just ain’t cool anymore.

Well I made the commitment long before that movie. It was in 2007 when I witnessed with my own bug eyes what my bite did to a child in poverty. You see, there I was…

Before you hurry off to get your creative writing on, remember this is a link-up. Make sure to come back here after you write your post and link-up with us. We’ll tweet out links to some of the posts throughout the week.

Now, get writing.*

*This is an official assignment for the Compassion Bloggers Network. Interested in joining the team? Learn more about how you can use your blogging influence to speak-up on behalf of children in poverty.

Malaria should be on the same list as polio, it can be stopped and cured! Why are 655,000 children a year lost to this world, why do parents have to weep over lives lost to a disease thay is so easily treated and prevented. We must act, this must change!!!!